The MFA is a two-year, 49 credit hour program. Students join an extraordinarily warm community every summer and winter for an intensive ten-day residency that initiates an independent semester of apprenticeship completed off-site through correspondence with a mentor. Students work with a mixture of new and returning faculty, working one-on-one with a different faculty mentor within their discipline throughout each residency and off-campus period.

• Faculty/student ratio of no greater than 1:4

• Grounding in the best of past and current writing

• Emphasis on craft and technique

Located in central Appalachia, the program welcomes and fosters writing that explores place and identity, though that emphasis is secondary to fostering excellence in all writing, and applicants are accepted on the basis of writing quality, regardless of thematic content. As a natural outgrowth of investigation of place, interested students may substitute one campus residency with a Wesleyan-supervised field seminar in Ireland, or may design and propose a seminar for other travel destinations.